By John Crowley, from a lecture delivered in June at MoMA PS1 as part of Triple Canopy’s Speculations (“The future is                     ”) series. Crowley’s article “Madame and the Masters” appeared in the February 2013 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

I am a writer of fiction whose pile of work includes two or three novels and some stories that picture future states of the world or travel through time into the future. None of the futures I’ve pictured are consistent with the others. Sometimes I’ve been asked whether I ever…